‘Bunker Hill’ and ‘Our Lives, Our Fortunes and Our Sacred Honor’

By JOYCE E. CHAPLIN

June 7, 2013

Each year, on the anniversary of George Washington’s successful siege of British-occupied Boston, a procession glides through the Province House, the old governor’s mansion. The participants are the ghosts of colonial Massachusetts governors. Unable to accept that the British lost the American War for Independence, they are forever doomed to commemorate a moment when it might have gone the other way.

No, of course it doesn’t really happen. The Province House was torn down in 1922. The gloomy spirits are fictional. They haunt Boston in one of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Twice-Told Tales” (1837). Nathaniel Philbrick and Richard R. Beeman are not writing fiction, but like Hawthorne, they winningly deliver twice-told tales about the founding events of the United States.

The story of the American Revolution has been rehearsed again and again. And again. Would we agree with Shakespeare that nothing compares to the tedium of “a twice-told tale / Vexing the dull ear of a drowsy man”? Hawthorne obviously didn’t. And historians often retell old tales, if they can put something new into them. Fresh evidence can come to light, as Richard III’s crookbacked skeleton recently did in an English parking lot. Or new methods can challenge or validate old sources; tree-ring analysis has revealed drought conditions in Virginia’s early Jamestown settlement — no wonder the settlers failed to thrive (and apparently resorted to cannibalism). The results of these new interventions may be quite lively, even to the dull ear of the drowsiest person. Philbrick and Beeman adopt a third strategy: simply narrating the tale once more because a new generation of readers will see it differently. The world is always changing, after all, so the past is always worth another look.

Philbrick, the author of several books of American history, guides us beautifully through Revolutionary Boston, with the Battle of Bunker Hill as his story’s grand climax, while Beeman, who has written six books on the Revolution and the Constitution, draws all of the colonies (and Britain itself) into a chain of events that culminates in the drafting and acceptance of the Declaration of Independence; he nicely demonstrates that by 1776, the drafters and signers were old hands at that sort of thing. The stories intersect. If you read the books together, you see that the American Revolution had both local and proto­national dimensions. The Powder Alarm, a British attempt to seize colonial matériel in Cambridge, Mass., on Sept. 1, 1774, provides the drama for the fourth chapter of “Bunker Hill.” Over in the sixth chapter of “Our Lives, Our Fortunes and Our Sacred Honor,” news of the alarm arrives in Philadelphia, as the last express rider in a 70-hour relay halts his weary horse at Carpenters’ Hall, where delegates in the First Continental Congress had, one day earlier, begun their deliberations.

Mansell / Time & Life Pictures, via Getty Images

What should our generation derive from these stories? For Philbrick, global events enliven the old tale. Because of their own primordial insurgency, he says, “Americans have a tendency to exalt the concept of a popular uprising.” They ought to appreciate any insurgents who seek democracy, including the “21st-century revolutionaries in the Middle East.” So, from Bunker Hill, Boston, to Tahrir Square, Cairo. Beeman, more domestically inclined, exhorts Americans to consider the state of their nation. In his book’s title, the key word is the last one, “honor,” shame-inducing or inspiring, depending on what you think of yourself (or your political representatives) at the moment. “One of the recurring themes in this account of the decision for independence,” Beeman italicizes, “is the importance of leadership.”

The exhortations are suggested, not belabored. Philbrick’s comparison between the Arab Spring and the American Revolution is nevertheless sufficient to give several parts of the familiar American story surprising resonance. Boston patriots published under pseudonyms (just as Cairo’s insurgents masked themselves behind Facebook), and there was brisk action in intercepting private letters (just as there was Egyptian surveillance of the Internet). We cannot regard partisan violence and the torture of civilians as entirely alien to our history after reading about John Malcom, a Boston loyalist who survived a horrific tar-and-feathering. When his scorched flesh peeled off in chunks coated in tar and feathers, Malcom preserved a piece as a withered souvenir to exhibit in London. Beeman’s evocation of the then-and-now may seem less fresh simply because so many scholars have been asking us to celebrate the American founders as peerless leaders, including Beeman himself, in his “Plain, Honest Men: The Making of the American Constitution” (2009).

In both cases, however, the rationale for retelling the tale can be strained. Should we really think of the American founders as nothing but gleaming pillars of honor? It makes them seem impossible to emulate — why even try? — and it may not be true. Beeman points out that the main record of the Continental Congress is desperately incomplete. Its haphazard author, Charles Thomson, had hoarded “secret historical memoirs” of the proceedings but decided against writing a history based on them, lest he contradict received opinion. “Let the world admire the supposed wisdom and valor of our great men,” Thomson concluded. “Perhaps they may adopt the qualities that have been ascribed to them, and thus good may be done.” It is a disarming aside, coming a fifth of the way through Beeman’s book. “A coup for mythmaking, but a disaster for history,” he admits. Why admire honor that may not have existed? The many Americans who enjoyed the recent film “Lincoln” clearly appreciated how the 13th Amendment was devised as much in guile as “sacred honor.” Might it not be useful to regard the Declaration of Independence the same way?

Nor is it clear that Americans exalt popular uprisings as a matter of course. The young United States failed to support the next case in the Americas, that of Haiti (1791-1804), at least in part because a majority of white Americans did not believe black people deserved democracy. Moreover, people in the Middle East might think of the United States today as not unlike Britain of yore. Did the insurgents Paul Revere or Sam Adams ever imagine that the equivalents of British Redcoats would march — or launch drones — under an independent American flag? The story of America’s popular uprising is necessary, but not sufficient, if we are to understand the nation as a whole.

The United States waxes and wanes. Sometimes, the nation is admirable and its example is useful to others. During the early 1800s, colonists in Latin America fought their own wars of independence, citing the United States’ example — Simón Bolívar was their George Washington. Then American prestige declined. Hawthorne caught the sense of a nation in decline by describing Boston’s repurposed Province House, in his day, as “a bar in modern style, well replenished with decanters, bottles, cigar boxes . . . and provided with a beer pump.”

But the Republic rose up again, and its contagious liberty spread once more. The Declaration of Independence was a model for some of the nations that removed themselves from European empires in the wake of World War II, and again for several of the republics that wrested themselves out of the dying Soviet Union at the end of the 20th century. These two patriotic books suggest that America’s founding could have comparable impact in the future. And yet the Boston Marathon bombings, done on Patriots’ Day, apparently by disaffected Chechen-Americans (who had originally planned an attack on July 4), make it sadly clear that the tale has many twists.

BUNKER HILL

A City, a Siege, a Revolution

By Nathaniel Philbrick

Illustrated. 398 pp. Viking. $32.95.

OUR LIVES, OUR FORTUNES AND OUR SACRED HONOR

The Forging of American Independence, 1774-1776

By Richard R. Beeman

Illustrated. 492 pp. Basic Books. $29.99.

Joyce E. Chaplin’s most recent book is “Round About the Earth: Circumnavigation From Magellan to Orbit.”